Windy Gap Rollover
In most of my adventures, no one is kidnapped by Buddhists.
I was 22 in the fall of 1966, and my coursework at UCSB was improving and veering more toward Political Science as the troop buildup for the war in Vietnam. I'm no fortunate son, so I was going to have to stay in school as a full time student to not become part of that. I paid my way working in a Goleta Gas Station. I worked 4 hours a day on the weekdays, closing up at 6pm, 8 hours on Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and all day Sunday, 6am to 6pm; a total of 40 hours. The owner left mid-day on Saturday and didn't come in at all on Sunday. A school bus company used an adjoining lot to park their busses, and we gassed them up at my 76 station. Eventually, I went to work for the bus company with better hours, and the Teamster's Union rate of pay.
It was late morning on a regular weekday. My class schedule was light, and rain was coming down in torrents. A friend, more than a friend, Roy King, had been the assistant Dean in charge of an experimental program in the College of Arts and Science, which I was a part of. Roy had built his home near the top of San Marcos Pass in the tiny isolated mountaintop settlement of Painted Cave, so named for the cave with extensive Chumash petroglyph paintings right along side the steep and winding road up to top.
He had built his house, charmingly, we thought, straddling a small gully that would become a gently babbling creek during the short rainy seasons. This day, however, there was an incessant downpour and the stream was becoming ever more violent, rising and threatening to undermine the footings of his house.
I had talked to him earlier in the day and he sounded worried about the situation. After my morning classes, I called him again and the telephone lines were down. It had been raining hard all over the county and I imagined that he might need some help.
I had that little English Hillman station wagon, the relic of the 1962 adventure in Oregon. I went over to my sister's Winchester Canyon house, and loaded up whatever shovels she had and raced up San Marcos Pass Road in the driving rain.
It was a pretty good road even in those days, two wide lanes with adequate shoulders. It must have cost a bundle to construct given the challenges of the steep terrain. At a certain point it became more feasible to cut through a portion of the mountainside than make a ledge around it. That large road cut is called "Windy Gap", a spot notorious for funneling high winds that buffet traffic.
It wasn't windy that day though, just a heavy rain coming straight down. The right hand curve through Windy Gap you could easily take at 70 mph on a dry day, and 60 mph on a rainy day. That Hillman would not likely be doing 55 mph, uphill, on any day, if I had it floored. I probably did have it floored when, at the very point in the curve where centrifugal force is at it's maximum, there appeared the 10 foot wide band of a slimy brown mudslide, completely crossing both lanes of the roadway.
All calculations of angular momentum, friction and g forces become irrelevant when the gripping of tire to wet pavement meets the zero friction of mud. I went zipping sideways across the opposite lane and slammed into the 18" earthen berm on the other side, and rolled up and over the edge. I rolled over at least once, maybe twice, down the steep slope before the Hillman hung up on some scrawny oak trees, with the passenger side up.
We still didn't have seat belts in those days, so I had just floated around weightlessly in this steel chamber of flying shovels until we all came together in a crunch. I seemed to be pretty much intact, though my head hurt, and I quickly scrambled out of the upturned side and up the muddy slope. As I looked around, everything was blurry. I put my hand to my face; it came back covered with blood. I was blinded, I thought in a flash of fear.
But I had just lost my glasses, and had a little cut on my head, and after shaking the car to determine that it was firmly lodged against the trees, I climbed back in and found them among the broken glass and debris on the floor near the driver's seat. Then I clambered up the steep muddy red shale up to the roadway. It was still raining quite hard, and by the time I climbed over the roadside berm there was no trace at all of what had happened: no skid marks, no scars on the berm, no broken glass, nothing. Those small oaks clung to a ledge about 60 feet below the road. Beyond that, the cliff is nearly vertical 200 or 300 feet to the bottom of a canyon choked with chaparral. If I hadn't been able to climb back up from the wreckage, I would have been a skeleton that hikers would find years later still sitting in the rusted remains of a battered Hillman station wagon. Back in 1966, folks would have said, "Whatever happened to John Oliver"? I would have just disappeared one day.
But as it was, I was standing along the side of San Marcos Pass Road in my grey coveralls from Oliver Volkswagen in Berkeley (no relation). I was completely soaked and washed clean of blood that had been on my face and the mud on my clothes. I just looked like a wet guy inexplicably trying to hitch a ride on a mountain road in a rainstorm. A couple of cars passed without stopping, then I could see the school-bus-yellow mechanic's pickup from the school bus company, coming down from the top of the pass where they had rescued a broken down bus. I even knew the three people in the cab from work. They went right on by, not recognizing me. Finally, I began waving my arms and a guy in a Cadillac stopped. I told him what happened and asked him to call the Highway Patrol, and in about five minutes, a CHP cruiser came by and picked me up and arranged for the Hillman to be retrieved and towed to my sister's house. Somehow, I made it back to work a few hours later, gassing up the busses and telling my tale. No concussion this time, just a little bump on the head.
So that's the way I remember it. I always thought of it as a funny story I could tell my grandchildren, or whoever.
I got the idea to plant trees in 1990 or 1991. I had been working at the skateboard factory for about four years. JW was out of high school and had an apartment down by the City College, so my original reason for having a steady job, my single father mission, was at an end. I was itching to become a serial adventurer again in the world of light construction.
I took a long road trip to Northern California and crisscrossed the redwood empire of Mendocino and Humboldt counties before coming back down to visit old friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. Somewhere on my journey, I got the idea to see that a number of redwood trees would get planted in places where they could survive, as a way of giving back all the redwood lumber I had made use of in my years building fences, decks, two redwood houses among the ten I had built in Hawaii, and 75 hot tubs, mostly in the Eat Bay hills of Berkeley and Oakland. I bought about 20 redwood seedlings of various sizes, planted some myself, and gave the rest to people I knew who could be relied upon to find homes for them. One I know of is about 80 feet tall, now 25 years later.
Returning to Santa Barbara and my job at the skateboard factory, I got to thinking about those scraggly oaks on the ledge at Windy Gap, and how I had been spared being smashed into pulp at the bottom of a 300-foot gorge. I owed them a karmic debt. So I determined exactly what variety of oak they were, Quercus Agrifolia, and purchased four trees, I think, about 3 feet tall. I drove up the pass on a sunny day, climbed down the slope and planted them among some of the older trees in little niches where any trickle of rainwater would be channeled to their roots.
It was just a few months later that I found the right moment to leave my job at the Powell factory and seek adventures up north. In the meantime, I went up every week, and climbed down with a quart of water for each of them. After that they were on their own. I like to think that some of them survived and stand there ready to catch the next fool to come tumbling over the edge toward the gorge.
We can see from this story why many cultures worldwide in their myths have numerous gods to explain why the universe seems at times to have conflicting intentions about us. The Rain Goddess was certainly busy that day, the God of Mud laid a trap for me, the God of Newtonian physics wasn't going to let me get away with anything and the Angels of Quercus Agrifolia, kept it from getting any worse. I don't know which deity smacked me in the head with a shovel.
Maybe it was Karma, in the sense that I probably had it coming somehow. But I am grateful for the whole rocky rollercoaster of life. Every second of our existence on this planet is a miracle. I thank all the gods for allowing it to last this long.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
I was 22 in the fall of 1966, and my coursework at UCSB was improving and veering more toward Political Science as the troop buildup for the war in Vietnam. I'm no fortunate son, so I was going to have to stay in school as a full time student to not become part of that. I paid my way working in a Goleta Gas Station. I worked 4 hours a day on the weekdays, closing up at 6pm, 8 hours on Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and all day Sunday, 6am to 6pm; a total of 40 hours. The owner left mid-day on Saturday and didn't come in at all on Sunday. A school bus company used an adjoining lot to park their busses, and we gassed them up at my 76 station. Eventually, I went to work for the bus company with better hours, and the Teamster's Union rate of pay.
It was late morning on a regular weekday. My class schedule was light, and rain was coming down in torrents. A friend, more than a friend, Roy King, had been the assistant Dean in charge of an experimental program in the College of Arts and Science, which I was a part of. Roy had built his home near the top of San Marcos Pass in the tiny isolated mountaintop settlement of Painted Cave, so named for the cave with extensive Chumash petroglyph paintings right along side the steep and winding road up to top.
He had built his house, charmingly, we thought, straddling a small gully that would become a gently babbling creek during the short rainy seasons. This day, however, there was an incessant downpour and the stream was becoming ever more violent, rising and threatening to undermine the footings of his house.
I had talked to him earlier in the day and he sounded worried about the situation. After my morning classes, I called him again and the telephone lines were down. It had been raining hard all over the county and I imagined that he might need some help.
I had that little English Hillman station wagon, the relic of the 1962 adventure in Oregon. I went over to my sister's Winchester Canyon house, and loaded up whatever shovels she had and raced up San Marcos Pass Road in the driving rain.
It was a pretty good road even in those days, two wide lanes with adequate shoulders. It must have cost a bundle to construct given the challenges of the steep terrain. At a certain point it became more feasible to cut through a portion of the mountainside than make a ledge around it. That large road cut is called "Windy Gap", a spot notorious for funneling high winds that buffet traffic.
It wasn't windy that day though, just a heavy rain coming straight down. The right hand curve through Windy Gap you could easily take at 70 mph on a dry day, and 60 mph on a rainy day. That Hillman would not likely be doing 55 mph, uphill, on any day, if I had it floored. I probably did have it floored when, at the very point in the curve where centrifugal force is at it's maximum, there appeared the 10 foot wide band of a slimy brown mudslide, completely crossing both lanes of the roadway.
All calculations of angular momentum, friction and g forces become irrelevant when the gripping of tire to wet pavement meets the zero friction of mud. I went zipping sideways across the opposite lane and slammed into the 18" earthen berm on the other side, and rolled up and over the edge. I rolled over at least once, maybe twice, down the steep slope before the Hillman hung up on some scrawny oak trees, with the passenger side up.
We still didn't have seat belts in those days, so I had just floated around weightlessly in this steel chamber of flying shovels until we all came together in a crunch. I seemed to be pretty much intact, though my head hurt, and I quickly scrambled out of the upturned side and up the muddy slope. As I looked around, everything was blurry. I put my hand to my face; it came back covered with blood. I was blinded, I thought in a flash of fear.
But I had just lost my glasses, and had a little cut on my head, and after shaking the car to determine that it was firmly lodged against the trees, I climbed back in and found them among the broken glass and debris on the floor near the driver's seat. Then I clambered up the steep muddy red shale up to the roadway. It was still raining quite hard, and by the time I climbed over the roadside berm there was no trace at all of what had happened: no skid marks, no scars on the berm, no broken glass, nothing. Those small oaks clung to a ledge about 60 feet below the road. Beyond that, the cliff is nearly vertical 200 or 300 feet to the bottom of a canyon choked with chaparral. If I hadn't been able to climb back up from the wreckage, I would have been a skeleton that hikers would find years later still sitting in the rusted remains of a battered Hillman station wagon. Back in 1966, folks would have said, "Whatever happened to John Oliver"? I would have just disappeared one day.
But as it was, I was standing along the side of San Marcos Pass Road in my grey coveralls from Oliver Volkswagen in Berkeley (no relation). I was completely soaked and washed clean of blood that had been on my face and the mud on my clothes. I just looked like a wet guy inexplicably trying to hitch a ride on a mountain road in a rainstorm. A couple of cars passed without stopping, then I could see the school-bus-yellow mechanic's pickup from the school bus company, coming down from the top of the pass where they had rescued a broken down bus. I even knew the three people in the cab from work. They went right on by, not recognizing me. Finally, I began waving my arms and a guy in a Cadillac stopped. I told him what happened and asked him to call the Highway Patrol, and in about five minutes, a CHP cruiser came by and picked me up and arranged for the Hillman to be retrieved and towed to my sister's house. Somehow, I made it back to work a few hours later, gassing up the busses and telling my tale. No concussion this time, just a little bump on the head.
So that's the way I remember it. I always thought of it as a funny story I could tell my grandchildren, or whoever.
I got the idea to plant trees in 1990 or 1991. I had been working at the skateboard factory for about four years. JW was out of high school and had an apartment down by the City College, so my original reason for having a steady job, my single father mission, was at an end. I was itching to become a serial adventurer again in the world of light construction.
I took a long road trip to Northern California and crisscrossed the redwood empire of Mendocino and Humboldt counties before coming back down to visit old friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. Somewhere on my journey, I got the idea to see that a number of redwood trees would get planted in places where they could survive, as a way of giving back all the redwood lumber I had made use of in my years building fences, decks, two redwood houses among the ten I had built in Hawaii, and 75 hot tubs, mostly in the Eat Bay hills of Berkeley and Oakland. I bought about 20 redwood seedlings of various sizes, planted some myself, and gave the rest to people I knew who could be relied upon to find homes for them. One I know of is about 80 feet tall, now 25 years later.
Returning to Santa Barbara and my job at the skateboard factory, I got to thinking about those scraggly oaks on the ledge at Windy Gap, and how I had been spared being smashed into pulp at the bottom of a 300-foot gorge. I owed them a karmic debt. So I determined exactly what variety of oak they were, Quercus Agrifolia, and purchased four trees, I think, about 3 feet tall. I drove up the pass on a sunny day, climbed down the slope and planted them among some of the older trees in little niches where any trickle of rainwater would be channeled to their roots.
It was just a few months later that I found the right moment to leave my job at the Powell factory and seek adventures up north. In the meantime, I went up every week, and climbed down with a quart of water for each of them. After that they were on their own. I like to think that some of them survived and stand there ready to catch the next fool to come tumbling over the edge toward the gorge.
We can see from this story why many cultures worldwide in their myths have numerous gods to explain why the universe seems at times to have conflicting intentions about us. The Rain Goddess was certainly busy that day, the God of Mud laid a trap for me, the God of Newtonian physics wasn't going to let me get away with anything and the Angels of Quercus Agrifolia, kept it from getting any worse. I don't know which deity smacked me in the head with a shovel.
Maybe it was Karma, in the sense that I probably had it coming somehow. But I am grateful for the whole rocky rollercoaster of life. Every second of our existence on this planet is a miracle. I thank all the gods for allowing it to last this long.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com